


we mean nothing to history (well thank god)

by smilebackwards



Category: DC's Legends of Tomorrow (TV), The Flash (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Backstory, Established Relationship, Fix-It, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-20
Updated: 2016-03-20
Packaged: 2018-05-28 00:27:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,067
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6306535
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smilebackwards/pseuds/smilebackwards
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Mick had once gotten two extra years in Iron Heights for shattering the jaw of a guard that caught them during a heist. It might have gone down better during trial if he’d been willing to express remorse, but considering the guard had completely overreacted and pulled a gun on Len, Mick felt his own reaction had been more than justified. The judge obviously didn’t agree. In Mick’s extensive experience, judges were assholes anyway.</p>
            </blockquote>





	we mean nothing to history (well thank god)

**Author's Note:**

> Title from I Met Up With The King by First Aid Kit

Triple-crossing the space pirates had gotten Mick an energy bolt to the shoulder for his trouble. That of course had led to Mick being dragged down to the med bay where Gideon applied some kind of skin patch and Len hovered and tried to press ice chips on him.

“I’m _fine_ ,” Mick said for the fifth time.

And he hadn’t even been lying until fucking Rip Hunter walked in and cleared his throat uncomfortably. “Mr. Rory,” he said, formally, “I’d like to apologize for what I said in the brig. It was incorrect and uncalled for.”

Len glanced sidelong at him with narrowed eyes. “What exactly did you say?”

Hunter didn’t look like he was eager to repeat his words. Mick wasn’t sure if that made him like Hunter more or less. On the one hand, it indicated sincerity. On the other, it was a cop out. Either way, Mick wasn’t going to say it for him.

“It was nothing,” Mick said instead.

“Clearly it was something,” Len countered.

Mick looked away. “Well maybe I don’t want to hear it again, Snart.”

“I’m sure I don’t want to hear it _ever_ ,” Len said with his eyes on Hunter, his voice like glacial ice, frozen all the way through. “But I need to know what I’m going to be refuting and how hard I need to hit this jackass.”

“All right,” Mick said, because he’d had time enough to cool down but any slight against Mick or Lisa was the kind of thing Len would never be persuaded to let go. Mick swung his legs off the uncomfortable dentist’s chair that apparently masqueraded as a hospital bed in the future and added, “Come find me after.”

“ _Exact_ words,” he heard Len hiss at Hunter as he walked out of the med bay.

Stein and Rich Boy were making a commotion in Engineering as Mick passed by and he stopped to look in. There was an engine making angry wheezing noises beside them as they argued and wrote equations on a white board, all brackets and functions.

Mick peered into the intake valve and put a hand on the cylinder block. Burning hot. He didn’t see why they hadn’t called Jax for help. Kid was a good mechanic.

Mick took the marker out of Palmer’s hand and stepped over to the board. Stein made an inarticulate noise of protest. 

“You didn’t account for temperature change,” Mick said, squeezing a ΔT into the equation. “The fan belt’s shit. You’re wasting heat.” He considered drawing a dick on the board, just to meet their low expectations, before he capped the marker and tossed it back to Palmer.

“That’s…,” Stein squinted at the board, “not incorrect.”

Mick snorted. “Thanks for the vote of confidence, doc.” He wondered if any of these people would ever understand that just because Mick liked things simple, that didn’t make _him_ simple.

Mick went to school with burns on his fingers and he didn’t wait until seventh grade to learn about thermodynamics. He scribbled Fourier’s Law on the covers of his notebooks the way the rest of his classmates drew hearts and traced out their names in cursive. And, sure, he blew out the windows of the high school’s chemistry lab, but he was just demonstrating an exothermic reaction. He’d always felt that he deserved extra credit more than expulsion.

Mick took down his toolbox from where he’d stowed it in one of the cabinets beside a bunch of fancy hydraulic drills and pulled out a Crescent wrench.

“Whoa,” Palmer said. “Maybe we should just talk this through some more.”

Mick looked at the heat shimmer coming off the engine and raised an eyebrow. “Thing’s already broken,” he pointed out. “What exactly do you think I’m gonna make worse?”

Palmer glanced at the old man for back up but Stein shrugged philosophically. “He has a point, Raymond.”

Mick had pried off the outer facing and was fiddling with the camshaft when Len stalked in, his nostrils flaring like a bull with a red flag being waved in its face. His knuckles had enough bruising that Mick could tell he’d punched Hunter at least twice. 

Neither of them had ever been very good at controlling their fists around people that mistreated their partner. Mick had once gotten two extra years in Iron Heights for shattering the jaw of a guard that caught them during a heist. It might have gone down better during trial if he’d been willing to express remorse, but considering the guard had completely overreacted and pulled a gun on Len, Mick felt his own reaction had been more than justified. The judge obviously didn’t agree. In Mick’s extensive experience, judges were assholes anyway.

“I’ll tell you just what I told that bastard,” Len said hotly. “Passion is not stupidity. You’re one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.” His eyes softened. “I love you.”

“Hope you didn’t tell Hunter that last part,” Mick joked. Len rolled his eyes and Mick pulled him forward for a kiss before he released him. “You know I like it when you get a little fired up over me, babe.”

There had been a time when they were younger that Mick hadn’t been so sure of Len’s feelings, when they’d still been new at being partners and even newer at being lovers.

“All right. I’ll see you tomorrow,” Mick had said, reeling Len in for a goodbye kiss after he’d declined to stay the night for the third time that week. 

“Is your brother always so cool with his partners?” Mick had asked Lisa the next day, concerned that he was crossing some invisible boundary. In retrospect, not his brightest moment. Lisa would always be Len’s sister before she was Mick’s friend and she’d gone and told Len what he’d said immediately. But it wasn’t exactly like there was anyone else Mick could ask. He sure as hell didn’t want to know what kind of insights Mardon or any of the other assholes they occasionally worked jobs with might have thought they had about Len’s emotional state of being.

Len had disappeared for two days after, seemingly confirming Mick’s fears. Then he’d waltzed back through the door and handed Mick a fire opal the size of an egg. 

“For you. I know how much you love joules,” Len smirked. 

Mick’s lips quirked automatically at the heat pun. He stared at the jewel in his hand—it was fucking beautiful, all clashing reds and oranges like it really was fire frozen solid—and tried to comprehend what it meant.

“I love you,” Len said, spelling it out, quick and precise. “Lisa told me I may have been playing that a little too close to the vest.”

Mick ran his thumb over the opal, smooth as a fresh-healing burn. “I just wanted to make sure I wasn’t asking for something you didn’t want to give.”

Len nodded. “One of the reasons I love you. But I’ll tell you straight so there’s no more misunderstandings.” He gripped Mick’s jacket and looked up at him, eyes burning blue. “There isn’t much I wouldn’t give you.”

Mick looked up the inevitable news stories on the web the next day. Len had gone all the way to National City for that opal. He’d broken it out of a Centurion X3000 vault and left everything else behind. Mick printed out the best article, one from CatCo Online that described the heist as “precise and daring” with a tone more congratulatory than disapproving, and taped it to the fridge.

He’d only waited another month to ask Len to marry him. When he’d pulled out his mother’s ring and said, romantically, “Would you?”, Len had frozen up for a terrifying moment. 

Then he’d smirked his familiar smirk. “You know how much I like ice,” Len said, slipping the diamond up to the knuckle on his finger. He’d leaned up into Mick’s space and added, his breath warm against Mick’s cheek, “And you know how much I love you.”

Mick leaned forward enough to kiss him, soft and then rough, since Len never seemed sure which he wanted.

They’d gone down to city hall in the best jackets they owned and Lisa had cried and hugged them and taken them out for pie. Mick’s never been much for mainstream, but if somebody asked what was the best day of his life, he’d give them the cliché answer of his wedding day.

Len glanced at Mick’s toolbox and patted his jacket pockets before pulling out a matchbook and tossing it to him. Len had made a habit of bringing Mick matchbooks from restaurants and hotels. The matches themselves never lasted long, but Mick kept the books, the covers with their embossed writing and colorful logos, hidden in the bottom of his toolbox. 

Mick caught it out of the air. _The White Lion_ it said in incongruent black print. Mick wondered when Len had had time to pick it up between the dollar beers and the bar fight. He struck one of the matches immediately and watched it burn down to his fingertips.

Fire ran in Mick’s family. His mother had a pink zippo. She used to flip it open every night after dinner and they’d watch the flame together, the pale flickering orange anchored by the hottest blue. Mick’s mother never told him not to play with fire. She’d let Mick reach out to touch the flame and flinch back and then reach for it again. She let him make his own decisions and decide which of them were mistakes.

They’d been in St. Roch in 1975 but Mick hadn’t gone to see his Ma. He hadn’t taken the cigarettes out of her hand, tapped them against his palm and said, “Honey, these are gonna kill you young.” 

He hadn’t told her those cigarettes were gonna to kill her _real_ young and all she was going to leave her son was her wedding ring and a lighter and a thirst for watching things go up in smoke; that he was going to go through three foster homes and a broken adoption before he decided juvie was the best home he was going to find. 

Mick put on Captain & Tennille and finished a bar fight in his mother’s memory but he hadn’t taken any chances with that little corner of history, because here’s the thing: juvie was where Mick met Len.

 

Mick painted his mother’s pink zippo red because the first rule of juvie was not to get caught and the second was never to have something that stood out unless you wanted to lose it.

Len had unfortunately stood out all on his own. Fourteen and scrawny, with frozen eyes and an upward twist to his lips that was immediately taken for a taunt. Mick didn’t usually like to get involved but there had been something in the way Len refused to stay down that made sixteen-year-old Mick punch Bobby Kitner in the face and throw James Aarondale against the fence. He hadn’t offered Len a hand up. With the other boys off him, Len hadn’t needed one.

“Thanks,” Len had said, wiping blood out of his eye with the back of his hand, and then added, shrewdly, “What’s your price?”

“You can have this one for free, kid,” Mick said. 

He’d walked away not expecting to see Len again, but Len had found him at chow time. He’d put his tray down next to Mick’s and offered him his cookie. Even back then, Len never liked not being even and he knew when to make a friend.

“You need more food, not less,” Mick had said. He hadn’t cared about anyone in six years and he wasn’t sure he still remembered how. Mick had taken the cookie though and people hadn’t bothered Len after that. 

The rest was history. And it was going to stay that way.

 

Mick put the rest of the matches into his toolbox and replaced the engine facing. He could come back to it later. Wasn’t like there weren’t seven others keeping the ship going. 

“Heard something about 1958,” he said, looping an arm around Len’s waist. “Know anything good worth stealing roundabout then?”

“Mick,” Len smirked, “You know there’s always _something_ worth stealing.”

Mick smiled. He still wasn’t sold on the whole legends idea, but they were sure as hell going to make history.


End file.
